A while back we posted a little bit about Javir, Terevan and "New Guy" but let's add a few other characters to the mix. Today we're officially revealing the Weaselmancer and a preview of the rest of the cast.

SPOILERS???

I wouldn't consider the material in this post any more spoiler-ific than what you'd find in an old-school instruction manual, but if you want to know absolutely nothing about Defender's Quest 2 before release, feel free to skip this post.

You know, a lot of people would consider being trapped in a cave-in with nothing but ferrets for company for a year and a half to be a negative experience, but Cleverness is a positive kind of person. How many people get the opportunity to experience all the health benefits of the cave lichen and dead bat diet? Or learn to talk with weasels? Or train weasels into a vicious, organized army capable of conquering a vast subterranean empire? Or feel the feeble social constructs of your upbringing slip away as you begin to adopt the values and practices of the culture around you? Or sit on a throne made of the pelts of conquered creatures as Ferret Warlord Goddess, master of all you can see (which is like, 35 feet, since you're in a cave, but still) as your weasel captains lavish you with the shiniest objects and tastiest morsels – you, their Queen and God?! Who would ever return from THIS?

What's that? A rescue party?

…Well I'm sure the whole reintegration-into-society thing will go off without a hitch.

In battle she uses her army of ferrets to help friends and harass foes. Outside of battle, she uses them to harass everyone.

Next, here's a sneak preview of all 14 Defender's Quest 2 hero characters (well, maybe 13, as Javir and Bitey the turtle-tank kind of count as one character in battle). Remember, in DQ2 there will be no "generic" soliders like in DQ1, but there will be trained monsters that certain characters can summon that will sort of take their place.

Please note that this art is very much work in progress and quite likely to change before final release. Colors and details especially.

One thing we've tried to do is create several distinct cultures, something we'll talk about at length in future posts. The first four characters are "domed city dwellers", the next four are "miners", followed by three "sky islanders", and the last two are "rogue scavengers."

We've resolved the situation! H2 Interactive will be handling the Korean rating stuff for us, so we're able to restore Team.SM's Korean translation again. It's live for Windows/Mac/Linux.

If you speak Korean, please give it a test to see if it works properly. We've also included the latest patches/corrections from Team.SM to update the translation. There weren't any immediate problems in the beta branch but I can revert it temporarily if anyone has an issue.

Thanks for bearing with us.

(If you speak Korean and would like to provide a translation of this message, please do so in the comments and I will edit the OP).

Sobre este jogo

Defender's Quest tightly focuses on three things: tactical depth, customization, and story. That means no random encounters, no spikey-haired emo kids, no forced time sinks, and no tedious, repetitive battles.

The battle system builds off of tower defense, with individual characters taking the place of towers. Each character levels-up, learns skills, and equips gear individually, allowing the player to customize their battle experience and strategy. The overall game structure is similar to "tactical" RPG's, but with a real-time battle system. Game speed is adjustable, and commands can even be issued while the game is paused.

It also features an engaging, character-driven story written by an actual English major! The story strives to be fast-paced, snappy, and always relevant to gameplay. Events and dialogue explain things as they become relevant to the player, minimizing exposition.

Finally, it's got options and accessibility settings out the wazoo, so that you can have the best possible experience!

Most tower defense style games are much the same. Arrange towers and use them to kill enemies. This one has plot, characters, and story. One laced with humor. If you like tower defense I recomend you pick this one up. It will get you hooked on both style and story.

Defender Quest: Valley of the Forgotten is a 2D game with a unique blend of TD and RPG from Level Up Labs. It features characters / companions who act as 'towers' and need to be strategically placed around the map to defend your main character Azra. Unlike a tower defense game, however, you can level up and equip items for your companions to help them improve in combat.

You take the role of Azra, a royal librarian of the Kingdom of Ash which is currently being ravaged by a plague. Azra gets infected and thrown into 'The Pit', a place where all dead or dying are placed to keep the kingdom safe because those who die from the Plague become 'Revenants', undead monsters that are immune to physical harm. Azra soon discovers that she has the power to enter both the living world and the 'Half-Way' world, a place between the living realm & the realm of the dead. In this realm, she can summon her companions to fight the Revenants in their spirit form and eventually kill them.

PROS:

+ Refreshing new mix of genres+ 8-bit sprite art style that works well with the game+ Character / Companion progression is deep and extensive+ Well designed Maps and Mazes+ Very challenging difficulty levels+ 6 base classes (towers) which can progress into different builds depending on your play-style+ Dialogues between characters are humorous+ Steam Workshop support

CONS:

- Cutscene art work could use a lot of improvement (especially the character designs)- Story is a bit weak- Balance issues (some classes are outright better than others)- Some necessary but boring grinding sessions to progress- No real 'HD' or Widescreen Support- No Steam Cloud Support

CONCLUSION:

It is a GOOD GAME and one of the better tower defense games out there. I can easily recommend this game if you're looking for a challenging and unique game since it mixes RPG elements to the tried-and-tested Tower Defense genre. The 8-bit sprites, animations and effects are nice and work well with the game's art style although the Cutscene artwork could really use improvements. The levels are very well planned and are fun to play. Finally, the in-game dialogue between your companions is funny and quite entertaining.

I can easily RECOMMEND this game even at full price since it’s only $14.99 or your regional equivalent. With simple graphics, this game is not system requirement heavy and can easily run even on netbook computers making this a perfect game when you're on vacation, working, passing the time, or in any other situation where you are not with your main gaming system.

To be honest, when I saw this game I only picked it up cause it was cheap, but damn if i were to talk about a game that game me the most value for my dollars, well it would have to be this one. If you're a fan of playing games through again, with like a second more difficult mode, that gives more insight into the story, well then this one is definitely for you.

If you're a person who likes turned based rpgs, there is alot of the elements of being able to take your time and strategize, while all the same, you can just charge through really quick once you know your strengths, and how to use them most effectively.

And lastly, If you love a good laugh that was written and delivered amazingly, you should totally name all the main characters after your friends and loved ones. It makes for a good laugh, and you think of your friends, slightly helping the social aspect of the brain, while completely being absorbed into this great single player game, that will make you think your not alone in playing it for so many hours...and if you're not really alone inside your head, well that makes the adventure even more interesting! Such a great game. I recommend it a few times over.

At first glance, Defender's Quest appears to be a silly little indie game with big dreams. The characters are bright and cartoony, and their dialogue is marked with sass. Their battle sprites display whimsical touches, like the ranger who spins her bow before firing. One of the promotional spellbooks Azra can equip, the Book of Face, introduces the Internet's beloved Trollface to the otherwise sword-and-sorcery setting. Focusing on the one-liners would be simple, as they are good. However, the core plot has heft: it would make a good Dungeons and Dragons campaign or fantasy adventure novel. Royal librarian Azra must survive in a quarantine pit the size of a small nation, while she's pursued by mysterious figures. It features conspiracy, betrayal, and explosions. Careful gamers shouldn't be surprised a USDA-certified English major wrote the script. The wacky comedy and childish in-fighting among Azra's companions allows the team to quickly bond. These light-hearted intra-party friendships and feuds add personal stakes to the more pervasive dangers of the pit. The story is delivered in slideshow style before every town and battle, tying the narrative neatly to combat.

Combat is handled like a tower defense game. Enemies travel in waves from spawn points. As they walk into the attack range of stationary heroes, they suffer the effects of the heroes' attacks. The heroes are unable to move from where they're summoned, as they're doing combat on a spiritual plane where bodies just get in the way. The cornerstone of battle strategy comes from placing the six types of heroes in the appropriate location. After recruiting story characters (such as Slak, the madcap, murderous berserker), faceless extras of the same type become hirable. If that's all there was to combat, it would be a delightful diversion. However, each character gains experience points, which can be spent to learn new combat skills or boost existing ones. Once learned, most of these skills can't be used immediately. Characters must be boosted in battle, which draws from the same Psi pool Astra uses to summon allies and cast spells of her own. It can be a challenging balancing act to position the proper allies, keep them boosted, reposition troops to respond to new threats, and maintain wide scale battlefield control with Azra's spells. Thankfully, slowing the game's speed (and pausing it altogether) are simple options. The keyboard commands are simple to learn and encourage faster play, but nothing's wrong with the mouse either.

With all the moving parts that go into battle, the multiple levels of accessibility are a nice touch. Each character has nine different attack modes including "attack the strongest enemy" and "attack the enemy with least immunity to status effects." Understanding the interplay between these attack modes isn't necessary for most of the core game, but integral to completing the optional levels. Furthermore, failure isn't necessarily punished. The default settings infer experience and money penalties for losing battles, but these can be changed based on individual preference. Redistributing skill points to explore different character builds costs money, but not a fortune. The steepest cost is the time it takes to click through all the advancements. The largest concession to the casual-vs.-hardcore debate is the option to increase experience points. Players who care more for the story and the thrill of rapid advancement can run with it. Players who want their hardcore bragging rights can lift their noses at the low-hanging fruit. True challenge-jockeys can set their sights on the more exclusive achievements, many of which are challenging even with gushing wells of experience points.

Defender's Quest is a short game, but provides plenty of options to extend the experience. Completing every level at the highest difficulty takes about twenty hours; increasing the experience and money levels in the options decreases the playtime. However, the New Game+ mode, which becomes available after completing the base game, adds considerable challenge. The core story stays the same, but combat's modified with new enemy powers, new maps, and new bonus stages. The New Game+ also provides a delicious means of upgrading the magic items earned in the core game, unlocking unique modifiers for each relic. As enjoyable as these new features are, Azra's journal is the best addition to the New Game+. After every major battle, Azra updates her journal with commentary on the story. In the process, she details her internal struggles and fleshes out the world. The extra character moments in Azra's journal are enjoyable enough that their inclusion as bonus material seems strange. They'd serve the story better as part of its body rather than as bonus material.

In spite of all this praise, Defender's Quest isn't perfect. Despite the snap and crackle of the script, it features several glaring spelling and punctuation errors--especially in Azra's journal. Purchasing equipment isn't as interesting as other elements of character customization, but the numerical benefits encourage frequently clicking through upgrades. The music is initially encouraging, but loops quickly. Thankfully, it can be toggled independently of the sound effects, which provide texture and valuable combat cues. The final battle song is a notable exception. That beast should be blasted loud and proud.

Between its addictive gameplay and sliding difficulty scale, Defender's Quest offers gamers a great deal for such a small investment of time. It probably won't make a true believer out of anyone whose parents were killed by tower defense games, but it's good at what it does: drawing people in and refusing to let them go until they've finished "just one more level."

Well, reviewing a title that is available for 2 years now seems useless, yet i'll do it anyway :-)

Judging by the graphics i wonder why i even bought it. Maybe because i like Tower-Defense-Games.But i was suprised with this cute little quillet.

What exactly is it?It's a TD-Game without towers. But with people. Typical RPG-People like berzerkers, mages, healers and rangers and...And you'll keep your "Towers" throughout the game and they'll receive XP and level-up. You can even color them and give them names.You move through a story with cutscenes, but mainly you'll fight waves of enemies with your party.

Don't like the speed of advancement? Change XP/monetary reward to 300%! Or 50%.

Leveling and outfitting your "towers" is a nice approach. You'll have veterans and noobs to place on each map.

Speed adjustment from 0x (pause) to 4x. Nice. Pausable at all times. No pressure there.

You can adjust your partymembers fighting tactics and even make them persistant (attack which target first, use high power abilities on lower foes etc.)

Beside your party you'll have your main hero that has misc. spells at her disposal.

TD-like you can play each map in different difficulties with proportional rewards. It pays to replay an older mission on EXPERT!

The way they make you "like" their facebook/twitter-page was really cute. I almost felt bad NOT to click :-)

Workshop! For those extra hours to waste

It has a real story with cute cutscenes. I admit to have skipped much of it, but for some it may add immersion.

The bad:

For some, it may possibly lack depth of strategy/difficulty. It looks more like a "casual" tower-defense.

Ok, to be nit-picky: The skills you're able to choose are too few. No big descisions to make, you're getting themall more or less anyway.

TL;DR:Bought "Defenders of time" at the same time and it seemed much more promising. Oh boy was i wrong.Kicked "DoT" off of my HD after 2 minutes and played this one for hours. Graphics is not everything.This is a fun and refreshing towerdefense-game where you keep your "towers" and level them up. Also you'lltry to outfit them with better weapons and armor. I surely had my fun. Would be even worth fullprice!

As tower defense games go, this is a really good one! I really like that on each level you can change the difficulty from calm to challenging to frustrating - so I can set it for whatever mood I feel like playing in. And leveling up as you go, then going back with stronger warriors to beat older levels on higher difficulty really feels rewarding.

The story has some humorous and somewhat interesting bits, but it's a mostly simple backdrop to the tower defense that drives the game. Once you complete the story, you can go back for the more difficult story+ mode which adds several sidequests to fill in some blanks. It gives the game a nice bit of extra replay value.

Pros:-PERMANENT progression with characters/"towers"-Challenging as hell-Lots of post-story content-Items are nice-Script is pretty humourous-Good TD mechanics. No mazing, but the mazes themselves are alright. Tower placement is emphasized

Cons:-Only a few types of towers, and you usually don't get enough Mana to build many/upgrade them anyway-Some classes outright suck compared to others (cough, dragons, cough)-On the other hand, some classes are NECESSARY to complete every level (assuming you're not playing on baby mode)-Unlocking everything is a pain in the ♥♥♥♥, don't bother unless you want to spend 800 hours on this game afking while your towers do the work for you

A straight and forward tower defense game. If you like the genre, I very very highly recommend this game. If you don't like the genre, I doubt any game would be able to change your mind, and suggest that you carry on.

Defender's Quest managed to impress me by literally exceeding the average in every way I can think of.

+ Not a rehash of another tower defense game - it didn't really do anything extraordinary within the genre, yet I can't think of a single game I'd call it similar to.+ Holy ♥♥♥♥, the story is actually good, the characters fun, and the funny parts actually funny.+ There is no ultimate strategy that works for the game (build/upgrade order, etc). Each map forces a new strategy based on the availability of locations to place your characters, and enemy monster types.+ There are dozens of maps, with 4 different difficulty settings, all of which have a New Game+ version which play differently. This game will take many dozens of hours to complete.+ The music is good. Nothing spectacular, but for the genre and the pricetag, exceeds standards.+ Lots of things to play with in the options menu.+ Family friendly - I would see absolutely no problem in an 8 year old playing this game.

I didn't come into this game with any expectations. I hadn't even heard of it before I saw the trailer on the bundle, but this game actually ended up being fantastic. I couldn't put it down once I started. The gameplay is well-balanced, leaving you with many levels just barely cleared once you get to the higher levels. While I did expect more from the RPG aspects (I literally built every unit from every class identically), I enjoyed the story, and found the game keeping my interest for quite awhile for an indy title.

Though, out of everything, I have to say that the best part of this game was its music. The soundtrack for this is amazing. It definitely makes every battle feel epic, and does change to suit the mood at certain key points.

Defender's Quest is a fun tower defence game infused with a little RPG element while having a strange yet humorous plot. The majority of the game isn't much of a challenge, so I would recommend this game to those who are new to this genre. However, that's not to say that avid tower defence players would not enjoy this with its strategic gameplay consisting of many unique map designs as well as the combination of old school tower abilities such as slows, critical damage and AOE effects. The RPG element in this game is very minor (you have the ability to upgrade skills and buy or find equipments) and without it, this game is your typical tower defence game. This is a great game to pick up to play for all kinds of gamers and non-gamers!

This game brought back refreshing memories of old school tower defence games I used to play. Unfortunately once you play a few tower defence games it seems like you have played them all. However, Defender's Quest is unlike all those other games with its humour and fantastic story to boot. I had laughed so hard at some of the comments between the characters when they interacted that I had to explain to my friends what I was laughing at. The game itself plays very well. It is not terribly difficult to beat the game, however new game + and the secrets hidden in the game are very difficult. Unfortunately it took a community of players to find all the secrets in the game, which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you like the challenge. If you are an achievement hunter this one will take some time and patience, or just some forum searching.

The best tower defense game I've played. It combines stander TD mechanics with rpg and story, bringing life to the game and keeping it fresh throughout. It even adds XP and Currencey boosting options to make things go by a little faster if you're getting a little tired of the gameplay.

I usually prefer to wait until I finish a game before I review it (barring episodic games but even then I finish the episodes that are available THEN review) but I enjoyed this game so much I figured I'd might as well review even before I finished it -- especially since it seems like there's so much to do!

First of all, I'm not normally a tower defense fan; I actually picked up Defender's Quest as part of a Humble Bundle female protagonists deal. I don't even remember why I decided to try the game on a whim but I'm SO glad I did. The story is interesting and, even better, funny. There's tons of really good characters and the devs have done a good job of creating a story that walks the line between silly and serious pretty well.

In terms of the gameplay, like I said -- I don't particularly enjoy tower defense, mostly because the ones I've played previous to this have all seemed far too complicated to be worth the time and effort. Prior to Defender's Quest, the game that I've enjoyed the most in the genre was Plants vs. Zombies. Defender's Quest is a step above that, really, because DQ actually attempts to have a story and character development, though the basic goals of the two games are the same. I'd say DQ is a little bit tougher than PvZ, if only because there's a lot more variability in the maps, whereas PvQ was a fairly straight-forward flat plain. DQ offers maps with multiple enemy spawn points (three is the most I've seen so far), different terrain (e.g., water vs. land), and various restrictions in routes for enemies (and placement for allies). I especially enjoyed the way you can change battle speed to slow down -- or pause -- the enemies spawning to catch up or speed up (4X is amazing) if you're sure your allies can handle the enemies without much management. It's a nice mix that I liked, because I prefer to micro-manage at the start, rather than during the battle. Even better is the different battle difficulty settings, so you can go back and replay battles on a harder setting (same map, different enemies) PLUS bonus challenges and (so the achievements would suggest) a new game plus mode -- means there's tons of stuff to do. Playing DQ actually makes me want to go out and find similar tower defense games to play because I enjoyed this one so much -- which is probably the best compliment I can give a game!

An excellent tower defense game that's very fun to play. The story is engrossing and well written and it has a nice difficulty curve. It also sports the best new game + modes I've ever played. I plan to buy the sequel to this day 1, and I plan to play the awesome free HD update that this game is getting from beggining to end.

I'm hard pressed to think of any part about this game I didn't like. It can be a bit grindy but that's only if you decide you want to try to beat all of the difficulties in 1 sitting. For those of you who like to slap a game into hardmode from the getgo I guess I'd advise you to stay away because hard mode will kick you in the nuts, light you on fire, and then throw you out the window unless your characters are ready for it.

Great game from an awesome indie dev team. Well worth your time and money.

Worth noting that I usually hate tower defense games. I think I got this as part of a Humble Bundle or something and only installed it when I was really bored one night and suffering from insomnia. It made my night a whole lot better. Characters of different classes replace what would normally be different defense turrets in other games, but you level them up individually with a skill tree unique to each class. These unlocked skills and stats stay between maps, so you might have one archer set up for fantastic range while you set another one up for massive damage and a third for rate of fire. This keeps the game interesting. Also, none of the maps feel impossible to achieve a perfect on, as long as you're strategic and patient. There's also a New Game + mode. In retrospect, I'd be willing to have spent full pricve on this.